Belief revision
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Network science on belief system dynamics under logic constraints Open
Belief system dynamics People tend to structure their beliefs in a way that appears consistent to them. But how do some beliefs within groups persist in the face of social pressure, whereas others change and, by changing, influence a casca…
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Rational Irrationality: Modeling Climate Change Belief Polarization Using Bayesian Networks Open
Belief polarization is said to occur when two people respond to the same evidence by updating their beliefs in opposite directions. This response is considered to be “irrational” because it involves contrary updating, a form of belief upda…
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Against dispositionalism: belief in cognitive science Open
Dispositionalism about belief has had a recent resurgence. In this paper we critically evaluate a popular dispositionalist program pursued by Eric Schwitzgebel. Then we present an alternative: a psychofunctional, representational theory of…
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Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning Open
This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals ( if ) an…
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Mental files and belief: A cognitive theory of how children represent belief and its intensionality Open
We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiariz…
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Knowability Relative to Information Open
We present a formal semantics for epistemic logic, capturing the notion of knowability relative to information (KRI). Like Dretske, we move from the platitude that what an agent can know depends on her (empirical) information. We treat ope…
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A Single Counterexample Leads to Moral Belief Revision Open
What kind of evidence will lead people to revise their moral beliefs? Moral beliefs are often strongly held convictions, and existing research has shown that morality is rooted in emotion and socialization rather than deliberative reasonin…
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Strong Syntax Splitting for Iterated Belief Revision Open
AGM theory is the most influential formal account of belief revision. Nevertheless, there are some issues with the original proposal. In particular, Parikh has pointed out that completely irrelevant information may be affected in AGM revis…
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DYNAMIC HYPERINTENSIONAL BELIEF REVISION Open
We propose a dynamic hyperintensional logic of belief revision for non-omniscient agents, reducing the logical omniscience phenomena affecting standard doxastic/epistemic logic as well as AGM belief revision theory. Our agents don’t know a…
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Reasoning Biases, Non‐Monotonic Logics and Belief Revision Open
A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics (epistemic logics; non‐monotonic…
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Representing, Running, and Revising Mental Models: A Computational Model Open
People use commonsense science knowledge to flexibly explain, predict, and manipulate the world around them, yet we lack computational models of how this commonsense science knowledge is represented, acquired, utilized, and revised. This i…
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The Learning Power of Belief Revision Open
Belief revision theory aims to describe how one should change one’s beliefs when they are contradicted by newly input information. The guiding principle of belief revision theory is to change one’s prior beliefs as little as possible in or…
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Trust as a Precursor to Belief Revision Open
Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust …
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Belief Revision in a Temporal Framework Open
We study a branching-time temporal logic of belief revision where the interaction of belief and information is modeled explicitly. The logic is based on three modal operators: a belief operator, an information operator and a next-time oper…
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On the Effectiveness of Measures of Uncertainty of Basic Belief Assignments Open
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Agents of change: temporal flow and feeling oneself act Open
Here, I put forward a new account of how experience gives rise to the belief that time passes. While there is considerable disagreement amongst metaphysicians as to whether time really does pass, it has struck many as a default, ‘common se…
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Why ‘believes’ is not a vague predicate Open
According to what I call the ‘Vagueness Thesis’ (‘VT’) about belief, ‘believes’ is a vague predicate. On this view, our concept of belief admits of borderline cases: one can ‘half-believe’ something (Price in Belief, George Allen & Unwin, …
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Extension Removal in Abstract Argumentation – An Axiomatic Approach Open
This paper continues the rather recent line of research on the dynamics of non-monotonic formalisms. In particular, we consider semantic changes in Dung’s abstract argumentation formalism. One of the most studied problems in this context i…
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The Choice of Ideology and Everyday Decisions Open
Individuals strive to make decisions that are consistent not only with their consumer preferences but also with their psychological needs and preferences. However, they are confronted with huge amounts of complex, ambiguous or even false i…
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Truth-Tracking by Belief Revision Open
We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of universality: whether or not a particular belief revision method is…
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Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics Open
A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfi…
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Reasoning about Probabilities in Unbounded First-Order Dynamical Domains Open
When it comes to robotic agents operating in an uncertain world, a major concern in knowledge representation is to better relate high-level logical accounts of belief and action to the low-level probabilistic sensorimotor data. Perhaps the…
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Bayesian belief protection: A study of belief in conspiracy theories Open
Several philosophers and psychologists have characterized belief in conspiracy theories as a product of irrational reasoning. Proponents of conspiracy theories apparently resist revising their beliefs given disconfirming evidence and tend …
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Do Language Models Have Beliefs? Methods for Detecting, Updating, and Visualizing Model Beliefs Open
Do language models have beliefs about the world? Dennett (1995) famously argues that even thermostats have beliefs, on the view that a belief is simply an informational state decoupled from any motivational state. In this paper, we discuss…
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The Choice of Ideology and Everyday Decisions Open
Individuals strive to make decisions that are consistent not only with their consumer preferences but also with their psychological needs and preferences. However, they are confronted with huge amounts of complex, ambiguous or even false i…
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Total belief theorem and conditional belief functions Open
In this paper, new theoretical results for reasoning with belief functions are obtained and discussed. After a judicious decomposition of the set of focal elements of a belief function, we establish the total belief theorem (TBT). which is…
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AGM revision of beliefs about action and time Open
The AGM theory of belief revision is based on propositional belief sets. In this paper we develop a logic for revision of temporal belief bases, containing expressions about temporal propositions (tomorrow it will rain), possibility (it ma…
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Contradictions and Counterfactuals: Generating Belief Revisions in Conditional Inference Open
Reasoners revise their beliefs in the premises when an inference they have made is contradicted. We describe the results of an experiment that shows that the belief they revise depends on the inference they have made. They revise their bel…
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'Knowing Whether' in Proper Epistemic Knowledge Bases Open
Proper epistemic knowledge bases (PEKBs) are syntactic knowledge bases that use multi-agent epistemic logic to represent nested multi-agent knowledge and belief. PEKBs have certain syntactic restrictions that lead to desirable computationa…
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Violations of Expectations As Matter for the Believing Process Open
For the purpose of this communication it is postulated that violation of expectation means a disturbing event or conflict interfering with a previously established mental state that affords a firm belief or confident feeling. According to …